In many wireless communications systems there is a limited amount of air link resources which are allocated for paging. In a peer to peer system lacking centralized control, devices may frequently use direct peer to peer paging, e.g., to establish connections with one another. Because of the limited amount of air link resource available for paging at least some of the air link resources allocated for paging maybe shared resources. This sharing of paging resources tends to lead to collisions and the inability to recover communicated paging signals which can result in the need for re-transmission of paging signals. Thus collisions due to congestion may result in the wasteful expenditure of limited battery power due to retransmission operations and/or monitoring operations.
The demand, and thus the level of congestion associated with paging loading in a system, may vary over time as a function of the number of devices currently in a local vicinity, activities, types of applications being used, time of day, events, etc. In some systems lacking centralized control with regard to paging resource allocation, gridlock conditions may occur at high congestion times with respect to the paging channels. During high congestion times, paging messages may interfere with each other and it is possible that only a small fraction of them can get through. If devices can not efficiently page one another, desired connections may not be established and traffic flows between peers may be unable to be maintained at an acceptable level.
Based on the above discussion, there is a need for new and/or improved paging methods and apparatus. It would be beneficial if at least some of the new and/or improved paging methods and apparatus could take into consideration signaling congestion, reduce interference, and/or provided improvements in terms of power consumption over known paging techniques.